JerekKruger

They also aren't necessarily false either.

We don't know that this writer was kicked or even pressured out of their job. It's not a particularly unusual move for a contractor who suddenly finds themselves in the midst of a controversy to step back from their other work of their own volition in order to avoid tangling their clients up in their controversy.

It's not Eric. I figured out who it was with a little digging, but since the name hasn't been mentioned in this thread I agree with Flow that it's best if it's not. I have no idea where the idea that this was Edér's writer came from.

A bit of digging online seems to suggest that the writer in question wasn't working for Obsidian and it was merely rumoured that they were being brought on to work on Deadfire.

My apologies, I was going off the OP since Eric was Edér's writer.

Is Eric Fenstermaker still writing Edér in Deadfire? I had heard he'd left Obsidian but had agreed to write Edér (presumably as a contractor). Hopefully that's still the case since Edér was one of the better written characters in Pillars. As for the main topic do we actually know that's why Eric was fired/pushed, or is it just speculation? Without knowing the answer to this question, there's not a lot to say.

Yeah, it's a sort of casual ignorant racism rather than malicious racism.

I bet Black Beard wished he was an Island Aumaua.

Unless Deadfire does terribly I'd be very surprised if Obsidian doesn't do another game set in Eora. Whether that's Pillars 3 or something else depends heavily on whether it makes sense to continue the Watcher's story, since Pillars seems to be the Watcher's series, but I can't see any reason they'd abandon the IP.

Well to be fair, in most situations a brace of pistols wouldn't be reloaded during combat, and generally the user would fire one, holster it, draw the second and fire that: not dual wield them. In fact that's probably why braces of pistols was a thing: reloading them was slow enough that it was worthwhile to carry a second. I might be wrong, but I suspect the same was true of Old West Gunfighters who carried two revolvers i.e. it wasn't to dual wield so much as to give them more shots before they needed to reload. Dual wielding pistols is, I'm guessing, a pretty difficult skill to develop and simply not that useful.

Exactly algroth. I'd actually like to see a compromise between the way Pillars does things and the way older IE games did them. Have the majority of content be handled as in Pillars, but have a (very) few genuinely well hidden secrets for those who like that sort of thing.

Real time with pause is very different to turn based, and I can't see a way of making it controller friendly that wouldn't make the game worse for mouse and keyboard users. As such, I find Josh's comments very reassuring.

Agreed. I remember stumbling on the high level slaver's door for the first time. It felt pretty cool to discover. I never discovered Twisted Rune by myself though. That required the help of dsimpson. In modern RPGs, all too often the big secrets are way to clearly sign posted. I guess if you don't read all the lore in the game you might miss them, but for me they're obvious. I wouldn't mind a few genuinely hard to find secrets in Deadfire.

There are a few things in Baldur's Gate 2 that would be hard to catch even if you are an exploring completionist. The high level slaver encounter is one, as it's the twisted rune. Compared to modern games, BG2 simply didn't give anywhere near as many or as obvious clues to these things.

Yeah, by and large this has actually been a pretty civil and interesting discussion on a topic that, in many parts of the internet, often results in flame wars.

Heh, happens to us all

Dual wielding pistols has even featured in some video clips (probably one of Josh's Twitter or Instagram ones) and the character holds one pistol under their armpit whilst reloading the other, then switches to reload the first.

Indeed. It's definitely worth reminding ourselves of this from time to time.

@algroth - I'll have to replay PoE to really reply to your post properly. It's something I do intend to do before Deadfire, though I very well might have forgotten this thread by the time I do.

For a high level Barbarian they'd be pretty good too. The +1 ACC per level that Carnage hits get would eventually make them higher accuracy than the main attack (+10 at level 16 if you take accurate carnage I think) so with high Perception and high Intellect you'll be paralysing big groups of enemies.

It's both fascinating and slightly depressing at the same time isn't it. EDIT: I suspect Xan would have some useful comments on engaging in online arguments

How would one go about discovering that there is 'nothing' though? I'm about as strong an atheist as I think it's possible to rationally be, but I don't think we can (or ever will be able to) rule out the possibility that the Universe was created by something that could be described as a god. As soon as we start talking about things happening outside of our own physical reality we lose the ability to make empirical observations. Now it's quite possible to rule out specific kinds of gods, in particular ones that directly intervene in the world and provide moral instruction in the way of revelation, and given a large part of why the Engwithans felt the need to create gods to fill the gap was the fear of how people would act without a source of transcendental morality (something that a mere demiurge doesn't provide), but I don't think there is any meaningful way to absolutely disprove the existence of a creator. Ultimately an unfeeling/uninterested creator will be indistinguishable from the nothingness that the Engwithans found. However I still stand by my point about it not being an atheistic world. There are gods. It only feels atheistic if you insist that your gods are in fact the creators of the world. Well what they say represents what they believe, but they might very well be wrong.

I'd be interested in it.

Welcome to the internet

If Obsidian are going to include the descriptive text in dialogue as they did in Pillars (which I liked) then I'd prefer it if there was a narrator reading it out when the dialogue is voice acted. I tend to read along with voice acted dialogue, and I too found it jarring when it jumps past big chunks of descriptive text.